Indeed, just two days after the bombings, two men strolling alongside Tashkent’s Independence Square noticed a chunk of jagged metal buried beneath fallen leaves. It was a piston, and appeared by its freshly scratched, ragged edges to have been recently and violently ripped from a car engine. They believed it might be evidence. Yet when they pointed out the shard to a policeman, he told them to move on. Two days later, the two men, who spoke to NEWSWEEK on condition of anonymity, found the piece of metal still lying in the same spot. “The Uzbek government seemed to have a good idea who they wanted to finger, not having done any forensic work,” says Adam Smith Albion, an American authority on Uzbekistan based in Tashkent. “This is a gift to the Uzbek government to blame the explosion on anyone they want to see locked away.”
It has turned out to be a handy gift for radical Muslims as well. Last week a little-known group called the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan faxed a message to the BBC threatening to set off more bombs in Uzbekistan unless Karimov stops targeting Muslims. The group did not claim responsibility for the February blasts but seemed determined to capitalize on the prevailing climate of chaos and mistrust. Whether or not the country faced an actual threat from Muslim fundamentalists before, it certainly does now. “If you sacrifice freedom for stability, you will have neither freedom nor stability,” a top Karimov appointee, who asked to remain nameless, told NEWSWEEK. “It is a dangerous situation–very dangerous.”
Karimov, 60, has always played a high-stakes game. Gambling that the 24 million people in his Central Asian nation would pay almost any price for stability, he has run the country like a Soviet-style police state, complete with an effective ban on critics. He has rebuffed the overtures of Western governments and the International Monetary Fund. After the February bombings, Karimov went on national television and vowed to punish the perpetrators. “If necessary, we shall cut off hands,” he said. Authorities restricted movements into and out of the country. State-run television ran photos of a couple it called prime suspects, and many Muslim suspects were eventually arrested in Kyrgyzstan.
Even some of Karimov’s own lieutenants agree that the wrong people are in jail. They say that the sophisticated coordination of the attacks–combined with the easy penetration of Karimov’s tight security–point to an inside job. “They had to be experts,” says the Karimov appointee. Karimov has no shortage of enemies. He recently fired a group of senior officials, who might hold grudges. Neighboring Tajikistan has accused Uzbekistan of backing rebels who attempted a coup last fall. But apparently it doesn’t matter to Karimov who planted the bombs–as long as he can use them to his advantage.
